


and after this, what next?

by oredatte



Series: dave strider pity party: the movie [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, POV Dave Strider, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, a series of vignettes about what to do with eternity, dave helping his friends through what he himself has not yet conquered, davekat is established and incredibly minor, epilogue who?, this is part of a series but it can also stand alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 20:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18763684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oredatte/pseuds/oredatte
Summary: What does it mean to be a god in a world that doesn't need you?





	and after this, what next?

**Author's Note:**

> the epilogue? i don't know her.
> 
> technically a sequel to cool guy syndrome but can easily be read independently

### I. THE SISTER

“I guess that’s it, huh?” You ask, voice hollow like you aren’t anymore, though you wish you still were. Five thousand years gone in the blink of an eye.

It’s all over, but for some reason, it feels as if the other shoe has yet to drop.

She looks at you. Her lilac eyes burn like brands. “Apparently so,” She agrees at length, as if she’s just as reluctant as you are to put that final nail in the coffin. You look down at the hands that dealt the final blow, hands that have seen more blood than grass or water, hands that still quake at your sides when your mind wanders.

It’s the end of an era. Should you mourn?

Have you ever truly mourned before?

Her eyes are still locked on you, but you have nothing to offer her, not anymore. There’s nothing left for you to give, guts scooped out by an unseen hand. You can’t see it, but you know it’s still there, hovering, circling, waiting for your inevitable fall. What does it know that you don’t?

You are silent. She says your name, an ultimately meaningless amalgam of letters and sounds, consonants and vowels, and you still remain silent.

You lift your head to look at her. She says nothing more, and neither do you.

Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds of silence stretch between the two of you like taffy, forming what very much feels like a noose that wraps around your neck and pulls tight. The minutes are eons condensed into a moment that seems momentous and yet ultimately meaningless. Everything you’ve ever done has been momentous and still meaningless.

“What will you do now?” She asks, voice piercing the veil of quiet, either cutting the noose or tightening it, but you can’t tell which. Her fingers smooth out already flawless fabric, eyes now cast down to watch her hands dance along her thighs.

If you knew the answer to that question, you wouldn’t be here, sitting on a desolate mountaintop and staring out at the nothing, now would you? You wouldn’t gawk at the gaping maw of the sky and wonder if it will swallow you whole, privately hoping that it will. She surely knows this. What does she want from you now, after everything? Haven’t you done enough?

Haven’t you given up enough?

You think she deserves an answer, a consolation, but you’re not sure what she needs. “I’m tired,” You tell her, praying that she understands everything you can’t bring yourself to say, hoping that it’s finally enough.

She was there. She should know. She’s seen everything you’ve had to do.

“Hmn. Where will you go? The others have been talking about creating kingdoms for the different species, do you plan to help any of them?”

Why would you bother? They don’t need you. They don’t need any of you. You’re vestigial, now, just a relic from a long forgotten age, from the creation of a world that’s gotten by just fine without you.

Sliding your shades off your face, you tiredly rub the bridge of your nose, squinting in the sunlight that somehow feels cold. You thought she’d understand, but she clearly doesn’t. “Rose, I just… I don’t know. I feel like I should, but… Fuck, I’m just so fucking tired.”

“Would you like to know what I think?”

“I know you’ll tell me no matter what I say, so sure, shoot.”

Her lips quirk into a small smile and she meets your now-naked eyes. Not for the first time, you find yourself wondering what she sees of you. With that scathing gaze, those lilac brands, surely she sees everything.

She says nothing for an infinite moment and you shift uncomfortably. It is pain, you’ve learned, to be known.

“You may want to figure it out soon. Talking to the others might not be a bad idea, Dave, you’re likely not the only one who’s unsure.”

Unsure. That’s a soft word for such a hard, clawing sensation—one of teetering over the edge of a cliff, staring into the abyss you’re one frayed rope away from tumbling into. You’ll inevitably fall, but right now you’re waiting with bated breath for the rope to snap of its own accord. You wonder if it’s better to just plunge now, or later.

Is it truly wise to prolong the suspense?

Standing up, your knees creak in protest. You’re a god and yet your bones still quake and bend, joints still whine and moan, and you wonder what time will do to them. What more could it possibly do to them, to you, that it hasn’t already done? What more is there to take from your trembling hands?

She watches you stand, but herself remains sitting. You begin to pace, feet following a path you’ve carved into the rock over many restless hours, many harried steps toward the edge of that cliff and back.

“What are _you_ going to do?” You ask her, trying to prove you took her advice to heart, but she just shakes her head at you like you’ve answered a question incorrectly, like you’re a foolish child.

She’s mocking you. You’re tired of her mocking you.

“You shouldn’t be asking me,” She says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. It’s not. You can’t follow her through that maze of a mind, that labyrinth of bullshit and circular logic, and she expects you to do so without getting lost. You think it’s time you let her find you instead.

You cross your arms and stare down at her. Your shades rest atop your head. “Why not?”

“Because I’ve made a decision that I would warn you not to make.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

A light switch flips on in your head. She’s in no place to lecture you, is she? “You’re going to do whatever Kanaya wants, aren’t you?” And she looks at you like _you’re_ the fool.

Her wry smile tells you all you need to know. You huff air through your nose—it’s so unlike her, and yet entirely like her, and you honestly don’t know what you expected. You almost want to do the same. That would be so easy, wouldn’t it? Just doing whatever Karkat wants, just making a troll kingdom, just bending to the will of those who still have purpose.

There’s something unsatisfying in that, in doing something solely because your partner wants it. This is about eternity. He hasn’t even asked you to join him, and that’s why you love him; he knows you need to figure this out by yourself, that you have to tackle your immortality alone, as you’ve conquered all things.

When she leaves, she takes the tentative peace with her, and you stew in your own indecision.

### II. THE BROTHER

You are afraid of him, even after everything. His words are warm, but his face is cold, frozen in a veneer of indifference cultivated by isolation, a stony façade based on a different you. His lips and his skin betray nothing. You’ve never been able to do what he does. You doubt the other you could, either. He wouldn’t know, and neither do you.

He was your teacher in another time, another life, but you learned only motionless lips and a clenched jaw. He is everything you thought you should be, everything you were expected to be, effortless, just like every aspect of him. Where did he learn that, if not from you?

What lurks behind those eyes you know better than your own?

His words are warm, but his eyes are empty, devoid of anything resembling life. He shows you the sunbursts of his irises only rarely, but when he does, you see yourself reflected back in those molten pools. You see your brother, of course, dead with glassy eyes pointed skyward, burnt and unseeing, yet piercing nonetheless. But behind that, beyond that righteous corpse, you see yourself, your soul broadcast back in vivid technicolor.

He sees the same in yours. He has to. He must, because he is hyperaware of himself, of every flaw and errant thought, of every puzzle piece that makes him.

There’s no one who knows or hates him as much as he does.

You seek him out when you want to see someone even more miserable than you are. It hurts you to do so, to spectate his pain with unfounded superiority, like he was made just to console you. He’s much more than a caricature, and you know that, but in those low moments, those dark moments, you don’t much care. You drive a knife into your own side when you do it, but you still do it, again and again and again.

His words are warm, but his heart is gone. You don’t know where it went or when it disappeared. He must miss it.

He welcomes you every time you appear to gawk, and every time you feel that knife dig deeper, blood seeping through the red fabric you don’t wear much these days. He hides his eyes from you for the same reason you hide yours—it is pain, to be known. You know him, you know what lies behind the planes of his glasses, his last attempt to keep the encroaching world out, because you hide the same behind yours. He’s your brother, but he’s also you, for once not in a literal sense.

When you seek him out for the 16th time, Rose’s honeyed words are floating in the endless sea between your ears, and you don’t find him. Not at first.

He’s always made himself available, always cracked open his ribcage for his friends to root around inside, but he’s gone, now. He’s hiding, you realize, just like you are. Has he reached that breaking point? Are his churning waters finally beginning to overflow?

You find him on a mountaintop. You see yourself again.

He’s sprawled out in the dirt, pajamas nowhere to be found. Does he loathe them like you do? Is he, too, afraid of eternity?

His arms are folded to pillow his head, silent glassy amber pointed skyward. You swallow thickly. You ignore the impaling sword your treacherous mind superimposes on the scene, the expanding ocean of crimson that seems to breathe with him.

He knows you’re there, he has to, but he says nothing. What is there to say when you can read him just by looking inward? What can you say to a man with the same sea?

“Dave,” He greets you blandly, surprising you. You didn’t expect him to speak. You wouldn’t have. So now the question becomes this: does he truly harbor the same sea? Are his tides different, does he contain an asynchronous ebb and flow of identical milky depths?

“Hey, dude,” You reply with a lilt of curiosity, using inflection for the first time in a long time. There is no more room for the shroud of irony and insincerity, not when it’s slowly killing you both, not when it’s liquifying his insides and leaking out his mouth.

He’s done so much, hasn’t he? Doesn’t he deserve respite too?

He doesn’t move, but you don’t expect him to. The spark of topaz against ruby would surely ignite, and neither of you would survive the resulting inferno, not with your walls crumbling around you the way they are.

“Why are you here.”

It’s said flatly, not even a question, and you wonder why you didn’t ask him first. You wonder why he bothered asking at all.

His hands are clenched into fists, knuckles bright white against the brown of his skin, and you wonder what his storms are like. Does his sea quake and tremble like yours, building pressure until your ears pop? How long has this storm been brewing, churning in the cavern between his ears, lashing against the shores built high to contain it?

The rain and the sea are bursting forth, seeping through the cracks of his very foundation, swallowing everything in their path. You wonder how he hasn’t drowned.

Leaning over him, reading the planes of his face like a favorite novel, you realize he’s been drowning all along. Every word from his lips has been gargled through a lungful of brine, you just didn’t hear it.

You hear it and yourself, now, in the sloshing depths of his throat. You hear a past you, one alone on the floor of an empty lab, haloed by an expanding ocean of saline that seemed to breathe with you. You hear gasps that slice into the crushing silence of the night. You hear warbled words and stuttered confessions. You hear the thud of a heart behind poorly healed ribs.

You hear your soul, broadcast back in vivid technicolor. How haven’t you noticed before?

How haven’t you noticed that he’s falling apart at the seams? He’s doing it right in front of you, motionless though he is, and you refuse to spectate any longer.

You say his name. He doesn’t look at you. He just stares through you, straight up into the gaping maw of the sky, because he’s not here, is he? He’s lost in an endless sea.

But you have a life preserver, don’t you?

You dive in headfirst. He’s your brother and he needs you. Who are you to deny him what he’s given so freely to you?

You lower yourself to the ground near his head, reaching out to rest your hand on his halo of lightning. The strands are stiff like his shoulders, like his fists, like his spine, like so many other things.

He visibly startles, frantic eyes meeting yours, and you know you did the right thing.

He looks small beneath the endless sky. You slide your shades off your nose and push them into your hair, showing him what you’ve shown so few.

He’s watching you. Of course he’s watching you. You silently lift your palm, fingers still lightly pressed into his hair, asking a silent question, and you watch him battle with himself. A long moment passes, two minutes and twenty-three seconds of eternity, before he nods, an almost imperceptible motion. You feel it with the pads of your fingers, fingers you now bury into golden peaks.

The gel is tacky beneath your hands.

Three minutes and nine seconds into the cathartic push and pull of hair and skin, you start to hum, and when his cheeks became wet seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, you don’t stop humming. You can’t begrudge him this.

Sixteen minutes and fifty-one seconds later, the strands are soft under your fingers.

After twenty-one minutes and seventeen seconds, he plucks the glasses off his face and crushes them to dust in his fist. Neither of you mourn them.

Thirty-four minutes and fifty-six seconds pass before he speaks, voice hoarse and lips trembling in the thin air that pushes down on your shoulders, gluing you to the dirt. “What do we even have now, in this new world that grew without us?”

“Each other.”

“Is that enough?”

“If you let them in? Yeah.”

### III. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

She goes missing for long stretches of time, disappearing into the ether in search of something she’ll never say aloud, something to keep her mind sane and her heart beating. If she was ever integral to your daily life, she’s not any longer. You go months without seeing her and sometimes, when her unseeing eyes are locked with yours, begging for something you can’t possibly give, you wish she’d never come back.

You love her. You’re not sure how, exactly, you love her, but you love her. You always have. She’s your friend, and your sister, and was maybe more once upon a time. Now, being with her hurts, because her sadness is infectious. It seeps from her pores in waves and settles in your lungs like pneumonia.

If she were to disappear for good, you’d know she found what she was looking for, and maybe, just maybe, she’d be happy, then. You want her to be happy more than anything. If you have to let her go for that, so be it. Anything is better than this, than watching her slowly rot from the inside out. She’s missing an integral part of herself. There’s a gaping wound in her side and her guts are slowly trickling out, sliding down her legs and gluing her down, forcing her to stagnate. You know what she’s looking for.

Every time she comes back, her shoulders droop ever so slightly more. Every time she comes back, her lips are pulled ever so slightly tighter over her teeth. Every time she comes back, she’s closer to nothingness, and you’re not sure how much longer she can take it.

She’s going to bleed out, eventually. She’s made no move to bandage the wound.

You try to reach out, to help or comfort or even just acknowledge, but she refuses, more stubborn than ever. You wonder what she gains from pigheadedness, from denying aid, from killing herself slowly but surely. She’s sinking onto the blade of a knife in her back, an old would she keeps reopening with a fervor you can’t understand. You wonder if the pain drives her forward, like yours did once upon time. Does she need something to keep her grounded? You would ground her, if she let you. Karkat would ground her, if she let him. Yet she bares her teeth and snaps like a caged animal, curling in on herself to lick wounds she bit into her own flesh.

Many days between her sojourns into the nothing find you awake late at night, slumped in your empty kitchen, cradling your head in your hands. There is peace only here, when the house is asleep, when it’s just you and your thoughts, alone and unseen.

If you are this tired just from tangential observation, her exhaustion must be unfathomable. She keeps probing deeper into that eternal cavity in her chest, the gaping maw of the unknown, and one of these days, she won’t come back. She’ll be swallowed whole and the universe will lick its bloody lips. She’ll be naught but another child claimed by the void, by the nothing, by the emptiness that you all house deep beneath your skin.

What can be done to help one who does not want it?

You wonder if you should corner her, back her up against the edge of a cliff, and try to force answers from her lips. Knowing her, she will step back, and you will only watch as she plunges into the abyss. There is nothing at the bottom. That is where she wants to be.

When she goes missing for nine months, you can’t stand by any longer; you will not ignore her slow descent into the endless sky. She comes back with slumped shoulders and trembling fingers, words that come out warbled and wet, and you grab her hand. She is pliant as you drag her, hanging limply as you take to the air. She is lifeless—alive, but hollow, as if her guts were removed by an unseen hand and replaced with something similar but not quite right. You see yourself in her red, red eyes.

You fly to your mountaintop, where you once let Rose take you apart, where you once put yourself back together again. She stays on the ground you lower her onto, a heap of limbs and flesh that quakes with the stress of being alive, unmoving beyond the tumultuous tremors of a mind falling apart.

Even now you are unsure what to do. Your hands itch to move, to touch, to help, but what can you do? What can you do that you haven’t already done? You brought her here, but for what?

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” You ask, though you already know why.

She says nothing.

“TZ, this can’t continue. Your body can’t handle it, your mind can’t handle it. Let me help you.”

She still says nothing.

“She’s not coming back. You know that, I know that, we all know that.”

She’s crying, now, but she says nothing.

“Your life matters, dude. You deserve to be happy independent of her.”

Her fingers are clawing at the ground, nails tearing into the dirt, teal tears streaming down her pallid face, and she still says nothing.

“You need a reason to live, TZ, and I’m gonna get you one whether you want it or not.”

For the first time in a year and a half, you hear her voice. “Why?” She croaks out, word cast from her throat like bile, like it took every effort to spit the syllable past her lips.

“Because you’re my fucking friend, TZ, and I can’t just stand by and watch you slowly kill yourself. It ain’t right. You deserve to be happy, and I owe it to you to make you happy, so you’re gonna be fucking happy if it kills me. Got it?”

Her laugh is rough like sandpaper and crumbling like a ruin, but it still sounds like home. She hasn’t lost her spark, that special something that this far kept her going after every loss, and you suddenly know that everything will be okay. It’ll be okay because she’s still herself, under the blood and matted hair, under the pressure of eternity, and she’s always been a fighter. She’s always turned out okay.

So this, too, will turn out okay. It has to.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading


End file.
